1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method of displaying to a user the relationships between source, instruction, and result elements of a mapped function by highlighting interrelated elements. In an exemplary embodiment, an XSLT (eXtensible Style Language Transformations) stylesheet editor incorporates this highlighting method, thereby allowing a user to better understand how the rules within an XSLT stylesheet being edited will match input data and what output data the rules will provide.
2. Description of the Related Art
An XSLT (eXtensible Style Language Transformations) stylesheet consists of a set of rules that describes how to process elements found in an input XML (eXtensible Markup Language) document into an XML output document. Each rule matches one or more elements in the input document and describes the actions to take and the output to produce when a matching element is found. The result of processing all of the elements in the input document produces the output document.
Execution of an XSLT stylesheet is non-sequential. It is not like a program written in conventional programming languages such as C, C++, Java, Basic, FORTRAN, Cobol, etc. This non-sequential execution produces a barrier to IT professionals attempting to write and use it. It has a very different execution paradigm than those to which they are accustomed. This means that tools for understanding execution of an XSLT stylesheet can be very different than similar tools for sequential programming languages, such as “debuggers.”
Specific to the present invention, in development of a XSLT stylesheet editor, one feature incorporated into the editor provides the means to trace and break execution of the stylesheet, analogous to that used in a standard debugger. The inventors realized that this method is not particularly useful in the tree-structure environment of XSLT since it provides a narrow window into the operation of the stylesheet.